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..."where you" question, but shocking, violent acts--the attack on Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001--raise the question in a way that demands a fuller explanation, one less likely to be nostalgic, more likely to reveal the personal in the political response, and vice versa. Without question, Abraham Lincoln's assassination, which occurred on April 14 but became known to the public the following day, was such an event, described at the time in terms similar to those of more recent time-stopping national tragedies. Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking in Concord on April 19, remarked that "[i]n this country, on Saturday, every one was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow." (1) Henry Lyman Morehouse, a minister in East Saginaw, Michigan, described the reaction to the news from "over the wires": "Business stopped; hearts throbbed almost audibly; knots of men congregated on the streets; telegraph offices were thronged by anxious faces; and all were incredulous that such a stupendous, nefarious transaction had occurred in America.... America mourns as she never mourned before." (2) My question, then, is how did Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass, two of the most perceptive and thoughtful civilian observers of the war and its causes, react to this event that, even then, nearly everyone recognized as epochal, the event that would redefine the war and divide Part One of American history from Part Two? (3)
The response of the nation to Lincoln's assassination was complex because "the nation" at that moment included former slave owners, freedmen, Southern whites who had not owned slaves, "Copperheads," abolitionists, white Northerners who had rioted against the draft, men who had burned Lincoln in effigy upon his election, and others who had supported him all along or had come around to him in the course of the war. But throughout the North, Lincoln's death had a unifying effect; it was hard to separate the intense mourning from the sanctification--even deification--of Lincoln and the calls for vengeance against the Confederacy. On April 15, slogans such as "Our Father" and "Our Savior" adorned portraits of Lincoln displayed outside people's homes. (4) Other public displays proclaimed him the Redeemer: "A martyr to the cause of man / His blood is freedom's eucharist / And in the world's great hero list, / His name shall lead the van." (5) In a sermon delivered the week after the assassination, Henry Ward Beecher likened Lincoln to Moses, who saw but could not enter the promised land of a post-war, post-slavery America; Lincoln "wrestled ceaselessly, through four black and dreadful purgatorial years, wherein God was cleansing the sins of His people as by fire." (6) The fact that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday enforced such providential interpretations of the assassination, many of which were delivered by Northern ministers on what came to be known as "Black Easter," April 16. "Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader," the Melville family's pastor Henry Bellows told his congregation, "dying on the anniversary of our Lord's great sacrifice, a mighty sacrifice himself for the sins of a whole people." (7)
But what did the Lord intend in having "Father Abraham" sacrificed less than a week after the war's end? According to Merrill Peterson, the typology of Lincoln-as-Christ suggested conciliation with the defeated South, as Lincoln had urged in his second inaugural (Peterson 7). But in the weeks following the assassination, the more prevalent providential reading envisioned God removing the compassionate, forgiving Lincoln from the stage in order that justice might be served; Lincoln's assassination both demanded retribution against the Confederacy for the act itself and cleared the way for divinely sanctioned punitive measures against traitors. In New York, signs reading "Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood" and "Death to Assassins" appeared on the streets (Nudelman 95); in the pulpit, William Ives Buddington proclaimed, "God needed the blood of martyrs, in their day, to corroborate and sanctify His Gospel! God needed, likewise, the blood of Abraham Lincoln! We can already see that it is doing what his life and his best services were powerless to accomplish.... We believe God has permitted it that the power of evil arrayed against us may be the more quickly and effectually crushed" (as qtd. in Chesebrough 68). Believing (wrongly) that Vice President Andrew Johnson would deal more harshly with the South than Lincoln would have, Northern ministers such as E. E. Adams told their congregations that "God saw this as necessary in finishing up this great rebellion. He saw that the good and kind-hearted man would not be the one for this work; for he has taken him away" (Peterson 8). Grief and anger temporarily united the North, as hundreds of thousands of mourners thronged to view Lincoln's body on its...
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